It is day 73 and I am feeling pretty good. I can walk like a normal person. I can work out with light free weights. Every day, I seem to get stronger. This makes me nervous. Whenever I am feeling good, I look over my shoulder for some damn Damocles who is lurking about waiting to lop of my head. I can’t shake this feeling that something nefarious is afoot in transplant land. In this case, my mind is working out a scenario something like this: You’re feeling pretty good, you have no evidence of even mild graft versus host disease maybe that means that the transplant is not working; maybe your old, leukemia-ridden blood is winning the battle. Of course, the same logic could work equally well if I was feeling lousy. Feeling crappy could be evidence of a transplant failure too. Or, as Bonnie likes to point out, it could be evidence of nothing at all. But never mind the logic of it. We’re talking feelings. Bonnie thinks I’m nuts. She says that she’s tired of all my pessimism crap. She says that for me, the glass is always half empty. Nothing could be further from the truth. Beneath this dour exterior beats the heart of an equivocating optimist. For me, the glass is never half empty; it is always half full …of (ugh) prune juice; that I’m forced to drink. How can you call that pessimism?

Unlike those of you out there in the world where you’ve got tons and tons of external checks and stops that help to keep you sane, I can only rely on Bonnie to keep my afloat and right side up. The problem though is that she is going through this with me. How do I know she’s still got all her marbles? They say people in solitary confinement lose their minds after a certain period of time. There is some evidence that this is happening to the detainees in Gitmo. I’m not sure I can trust her judgment. The foregoing is either evidence of paranoia or logic. You call it.

The other day, while channel surfing, I ran into a commercial for a device that cuts tomatoes into little cubes. This resonated with me. I’ve been dreaming about the day when I can have sliced tomato in my sandwich. It is verboten in the low microbial diet that I am required to maintain for 100 days total. So it seemed akin to blasphemy as I watched perfectly good tomatoes that would slice up nicely in a sandwich get guillotined into cubes of tomato pulp. Who wants cubes of tomato pulp, I asked? As if he were soothing my ire personally, the announcer said you could make salsa that way. Well, I’m just not buying. You can get a hell of a lot of salsa for 19.95 plus shipping and handling.

You know where I’m going with this? I’ve gotten to the point where I have nothing better to do than be obsessed by a TV commercial. I’m engaged in an ethereal argument about the merits of sliced versus cubed tomatoes. Old folks in homes do that. They get medicated so they won’t do that. It’s getting scary. I’m becoming concerned that the next 27 days of confinement could put me over the edge. This is a cry for help. I’m feeling good ergo I need a reality check. Will somebody please bring me half a glass of prune juice, pronto?